Writing for a Living

November 29, 2012

You know how hard it is to get good service nowadays. Chivalry is a corpse, discretion is unheard of, and elegance—elegance is currently defined by advertisements for discount furniture.

A wellbred woman might spend her entire maturity never once hearing the words "May I be of service to you?"—although she may spend her life waiting on others, particularly children and men. Such a predicament could make strong women weep and gnash their teeth, but when the going gets tough, the tough throw a party. A very unusual party.

It all started when I received an invitation to attend a salon of women artists. We were offered an occasion to read aloud, sketch, and indulge ourselves in a proper High Tea. Most intriguing of all, the invitation promised we would be served our scones and punch by naked slaveboys who would not speak unless spoken to. The aspect of social nudity was of course titillating, but would ordinary men actually keep their lips buttoned for an approximately five-hour affair? That had to be seen to be believed. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Upon arrival, I was indeed greeted by a nude doorman who took my coat. Alas, he was the only servant in sight, and in the meantime, guests were arriving by the score. What a delightful group of invitees they were, too. If I had been able to get a simple cup of hot Earl Grey, my afternoon would have been complete.

But unfortunately, although the company was sublime and the concept impeccable, only two slaveboys were on hand to provide services, and despite their best intentions, I don't think either of them had ever so much as poured a cup of decaf.

The guests were uneducated in the fine art of being served. Though a couple of us were dressed in literary salon frocks, some came in sweatpants. One lovely woman offered to get up and fetch me a scone, and when I gently reminded her she was a guest, she pleaded with me, "It doesn't matter, I'm a bottom in real life." Ah yes, but real life was what we were trying to escape.

The ultimate affront was the vision, midway through the party, of an attractive girl on her knees, giving a "slaveboy" a neck massage!

I departed with my friend, Laura. We reviewed the afternoon and agreed it had been a wonderful, yet insufficient, experience. Wouldn't it be perfect to have a party like that in a grand mansion, with slaveboys who looked like Greek gods and served like altar boys?

"I'll dream of it," I told her as we parted, but Laura wasted no time in wistfulness.

The very next day, she called me. "My friend Amy Wallace has a beautiful home in the Berkeley hills, and she would love to hostess the kind of tea party we have in mind. The living room is Byronic, and there are even special servants' quarters."

I blinked. The first hurdle, getting out of our filthy, tiny, crime-ridden neighborhood apartments, had been overcome in the twinkling of a phone call. Now where on earth would we find the slaveboys?

Laura was an editor of local weekly paper at the time, where personal ads of all persuasions abounded. She agreed to place an ad for four weeks, but I had my doubts about getting much of a response to anything so bizarre. I was more confident that in my Rolodex I would find lots of liberated men who would love to serve us tea.

Little did I know the raw nerves our search would scratch. I got my first glimpse of the reaction during a trip to my mechanic. "Look what I'm up to," I said, pulling into the garage and waving my carefully typed personal ad:

Genteel and Bohemian gathering of women writers requires comely slaveboys to serve at our tea party. You will serve nude and will not speak unless spoken to. Standards are high. Food and beverage experience a must. No sex. Please send photo and qualifications to Madam Tea Party.

"What the fuck do I want with waiting on a bunch of broads?" asked Tom, leaning against his desk. "You're not paying anything for this? No way."

Some little lost feminist emotion in me snapped. "Women have been waiting on you from the time you were born," I said. "And you can't imagine switching sides for a couple of hours?"

The next week, I saw Tom again, and he asked how my search was going. The ad had not yet appeared, and I was getting nowhere.

My gay friends said they wouldn't have any fun waiting on women. "Why not?" I asked. "Whatever happened to your sense of classic theater? This isn't a pickup scene, it's the tea to end all teas!"

My straight friends, even the most sympathetic, went into a panic about penis size and fantasized far more permanent humiliation than anything I had in mind.

All my reassurances were in vain. But fate was about to turn her head. The Wednesday paper hit the streets...

June 13, 2012

I've written book reviews for all kinds of magazines: The New York Times, SF Review of Books, Chronicle, Playboy, UTNE Reader... and their influence *paled* compared to the spontaneous (sometimes insomnia-fueled) reviews I wrote, as a passionate customer, for Amazon, GoodReads, Audible, Powell's, my blog's viral feed, etc.

I love writing serious critical reviews; don't get me wrong. Those experiences meant the world to me at the time. But as an author, even then, I realized the glam "serious" book reviews was the luxury end of something much more powerful: word-of-mouth recommendation. That W-O-M experience is now happening on the web clothesline— it's written in quick bursts of truth-telling called the humble "customer review."

When you tell the world you think a blender— or a book— is awesome, even if no one has ever heard of your name, you are wielding a mighty algorithm sword. You're making an enormous difference in some author or inventor's life. No kidding.

People were talking yesterday that the famously-reserved author, Thomas Pynchon, had finally decided to make his backlist available as e-books. My first thought was, "I'm going to write a reader review about what it was like reading The Crying of Lot 49 on my first backpacking trip, up to Mineral King. And my period started."

For some reason, those three things are forever entwined. And you know what? Pynchon is going to be reviewed and talked about again, by nostalgic people like me, and new people, and it's going to be the best thing that happened to his bank account and legacy since 1968. Given the mercurial nature of author fortunes, that's a righteous result.

My favorite-- but most tragic-- review "consequence" was when I ordered and reviewed "The Harry Potter Vibrating Broomstick."

It was made by some subversive spirit at Mattel for the Toy Department. Many other "potty girls" (see news clipping above) like me wrote similar reviews.

The product was lavished with orgasmic praise on Amazon and then PULLED. The fiends!

I would like to meet that clever sexy toy-maker and shake their hand. And also ask for a replacement. The darn thing died after a month and if I'd been able to add a review about that, I would've. I want to FLY AGAIN!

Have you ever written a "customer review" that you realized reverberated a lot further than you thought it would?

February 23, 2012

Many of chapters in your memoir are so detailed, especially the memories from your childhood. Did you record a lot of your experiences while you were living them— or was there more mental recollection involved in compiling this work?

When you write a memoir, you immerse yourself in the music, photos, ephemera, of all the eras you’re recalling. I found that even making meals I remembered from my childhood kitchen, would conjure missing details. Ask me about my "tuna on toast" recipe.

R: What were some of the challenges you faced while recounting the story of your life?

When I'd walk away from my writing desk and re-join the present moment, I’d get lost. The "chapters" wouldn't let go of me.

There’s no way around it. Writing is like being your own therapist, dog, and executioner.

In the preface of your book you write: “I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice– the cry of That isn’t fair! gets a lot more impulsive behavior from me than I want to get off.”

During the second wave feminist movement, these two concepts are tied directly together. How are they intertwined for you today?

I still motivate more from outrage than just about anything else. It's not particularly good for my health.

I too am the product of fiercely radical parents, so I'm interested in the description of your parents’ un-shockability in the book.

You tell the reader; “They were brainiacs; they were language, poetry, and music fiends; they took enormous pleasure in big ideas and the power of word. They were literary sensualists.”

I wonder if you felt their radicalness bestowed upon you a certain wild freedom—

Oh, no. My mom was liberal politically— very much so— but in her child-rearing and discipline attitudes, in our daily life, she was traditional, strict. We wore gloves to church. We cleaned our house from top to bottom every week. I was punished for slight infractions. My mother wasn’t lying around in a hammock smoking pot, she worked from dawn to dusk and came home exhausted. There was no social life.

Do radical parents pass on radical DNA to progeny? Have you ever sensed your own daughter trying to out-radical you?

I moved in with my father when I was fourteen. He did have a social life, he really enjoyed people. It was also an old-fashioned tenured professor’s life… no worrying about groceries. He went to parties and had friends and a love life; he introduced me to a lot of culture, movies, books, music— I loved that. But he was also a workaholic and devoted to his scholarly work; it meant everything to him.

I got “the work ethic” from both my parents, their parents too— as well as their sense of justice.

My daughter? She’s into all kinds of things I'm not savvy about, but it’s not like one of us is more “radical” than the other. I don’t compete with her in that fashion. She has tremendous compassion and sense of fair play… but gosh, who doesn’t, if you haven’t been locked in some gilded cage?

It was fascinating to read your memoir amidst the backdrop of the protests against Wall Street.

As a young woman you decried, “Why had people formulated revolution so long ago, yet nothing, nothing had changed?”

Later you state, “I felt like we were swimming against a tide of apathy.”

How do you perceive this in light of the Occupy movement? Also, what are some other ways in which you see revolution today?

The original activists of the Occupy movement have been screaming their lungs out for years, it’s just the times have caught up with them.

The pinkos, the anarchists, the punks, the anti-capitalists, the workers rights movement, the civil rights pioneers— those who’ve dealt with the brunt of racism and sexism all this tim— we never went away. We simply pass through depressing periods where apathy is in vogue among the chattering classes.

Just for my own fun… Who would Susie Bright crown as today’s George Putnam and why?

Oh, Rush Limbaugh, no doubt. I’m sure he aspired to be Putnam in his early years.

In this story, you portray your mother as a perpetual wanderer whose wandering spirit was bequeathed to you. By the end of the book the reader senses that Santa Cruz becomes home base, and a bit of the transience has faded. Is that an accurate perception and how has that affected your writing?

I am surprised I settled down in one place for more than a year or two. My mom was STILL making "one last move" when she was in her late 70s!

When speaking about On Our Backs magazine you state:“The premise of On Our Backs was going to be that lesbians were not celibates-in-waiting-for-the-revolution, or coldly distinct planets. We were alive to sex and adventure and being every kind of queer we could be.”

What is the equivalent now of OOB?

Equivalent to OOB? Nothing Fucking NOTHING. I show that magazine to people today and their mouths drop open. It is STILL ahead of its time.

I'm usually reading blogs or listening to podcasts or audiobooks or reading paper-books or going to live events. I follow many quick-witted militant bloggers.

I should give you an example but my mind always goes blank at moments like this.

One of my favorite vignettes in the book is when you are working at the feminist vibrator store and the two nuns who have been in love for twenty years walk in. You imply that it’s hard to imagine being with someone for so long. What are the sexual secrets for relational longevity?

It was hard to imagine such individual devotion when I was 21. Now it feels very familiar, since my loved ones are why I get up in the morning.

The ex-nuns advised me at the time: “We just love each other so much.”

You can’t bottle it.

You speak in depth about the emergence of the Apple computer and what it did for your publication. What was the influence of Steve Jobs' technology on your life as a writer?

November 15, 2011

January, 2009: I wrote this very brief history because when I checked online for a history of On Our Backs, there was nothing at all.

OOB was an influential and remarkable part of lesbian, feminist, and publishing history. I had to cobble something together, and this was a start.

I was the editor in chief from our first year, 1984, until early 1991.

The magazine itself has been long out of business. It had two owners and several staffs after I left. Hopefully, others will write their story someday!

There is a complete set of On Our Backs magazines at Brown University library, available to scholars to review at the library.

Update, 3.25.11: I have written a more complete and intimate history of my time at On Our Backs, called “Big Sex Little Death.”

For a photographic history of OOB, I'd suggest the book Jill Posener and I edited, "Nothing But the Girl."

Update, 9.1.11: OOB staffers, models, and contributors, from 1983-1991: We have created a private Facebook group. Please contact Susie or Lulu or Nan, at their FB addresses, if you would like to join us.

If you know of any other histories of On Our Backs in print, please contact me at susie@susiebright.com.

I moved to San Francisco in 1980, where I lived the life of the femme diva starlet in an anarchist commune in the barrio. In other words, typical City living.

One night, I read a poem comparing fisting my girlfriend to quantum physics at Modern Times bookstore in their newly title queer poets series. Queer was a subversive word at that time. Afterwards, this blonde chick with a pageboy slipped me a personal letter. She said she loved my poetry, and invited me to be a part of the first issue of On Our Backs, "entertainment for the adventurous lesbian."

If anyone has ever been seduced by the mere title of a promise, that was me. I had been a voracious teen reader of OFF our Backs, the feminist newsweekly, and it had broken my heart when their staff turned so viciously against sexual liberation. This new magazine offered the perfect antidote.

That blonde with the blunt cut falling over her eyes was Myrna Elana, one of the cofounders of On Our Backs. Her "work wife" and partner in crime was Debi Sundahl-- they worked in the peep shows and strip clubs of the Tenderloin district, and shared a Victorian in the Haight Ashbury with Debi's lover, Nan.

In the beginning, i was just a contributor waiting for the bells to go off. But after several months of silence, I sought out these mysterious OOB girls. When I found them, I told them I had been part of a high school underground newspaper, and I could perform any shit work connected with getting a magazine out--- what could I do to help? I could see they were overwhelmed.

The main problem was... you guessed it... money. They asked me to be the "Advertising Director," which if you knew my communist past, was a real laugh. But I worked at Good Vibrations at the time-- in fact, I was the only employee at Good Vibrations.

I earnestly called all the vendors I did business with, and asked them to take out little $25 and $50 ads in our debut issue. Hey, buy the whole page for $100! I remember our two big advertisers were Last Gasp Comix-- Ron Turner told me it was a "fine lesbian humor magazine" and just handed me cash-- and the Mitchell Brothers Theater-- Debi, as well as many of our first models, all worked in their sex club, or starred in their movies.

Kathy Andrew of Stormy Leather, the first woman to tailor leatherwear for women, was another one of our first advertisers. Kathy had an antique sewing machine that she operated like a crazed elf in a leaking basement on Sanchez St. Gosnell Duncan, who invented the silicon dildo, paid us to do a crazy beach/mermaid photo shoot with his "products". It was the first national advertising for dildos, and every issue he let us do another “campaign”, culminating in our Mapplethorpe-esque Perfect Moment where we modeled his favorite item, "The Susie," with a callalily and a beautiful round mirror.

My lover Honey Lee Cottrell, shot most of our first photography for the first issues, including those ads for Gosnell. When I think back, she might have worked harder than any of us-- the photo shoots were so hard to arrange, and then there was endless printing in the Harvey Milk public photo labs. She and HER ex-lover, Tee Corinne, had literally invented lesbian erotic photography in the 1970s. Morgan Gwenwald in New York was another pioneer.

You look at the first lesbian sex books, "Sapphistry" by Tee and Pat Califia, and "Coming to Power" by the Samois collective, and there you’ll find the first lesbian women opening showing their bodies and their sexuality.

It was no coincidence that the S/M, punk-era women were the first to show their faces to the public... they were the first to have the nerve. It was as if you had to be a career whore, a dedicated outcast, to show your face in a lesbian magazine... let alone your pussy.

When OOB debuted, some readers complained that they wanted to see vanilla, "bank-teller" type babes in the pictures. We replied, "Well, come on down and let us shoot you!" ---Because the punk strippers didn't want to put on bank teller outfits, they wanted to express themselves.

I'd like to mention some of the models that changed the way lesbians think about themselves: Terri and Caerage--- the most beautiful punk /butch -femme couple ever. Rachel and Elexis-- who turned the black lesbian community upside down. Kitty Tsui did the same in Pacific/Asian dyke culture. Pepper, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Ramona were the darlings of the first lesbian burlesque--- the girls would drown them in flowers and shots. Cassie and Raven, both now deceased, ( breast cancer and suicide, respectively) were the sexist women I ever laid eyes on. They started the first women's escort service and without a doubt could make ANY woman’s dream come true between the two of them. I haven’t seen such sexual charisma since.

I'm not kidding about the revolutionary effect they had on strangers lives. ONe woman told me she took one look at the OOB cover of Rachel and Elexis, packed her bags in Minnesota that evening, and moved to California. That story was multiplied many times.

Expressing yourself was what it was all about. I look back on that first year and just sigh at all that talent, and the rage that had pent it all up. Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, Pat Califia, Sarah Schulman, Sapphire, myself--- we couldn't be published in the lesbian presses because of our politics and sexuality, and we couldn't be published in the mainstream world because of its overt homophobia and misogyny. These were some of the best American writers of their generation!

Honey Lee and I were very close to Nan and Debbie, like a little family. There weren't a lot of butch femme younger couples at the time— in fact, we felt like the new demonstration. Even though Honey and Nan weren't technically "editors" they worked on the magazine all the time. When Nan got mildly injured at her day job we were delighted, because she got disability leave, and she never went back. She took over magazine distribution and embarked on the first lesbian porn video production with Deb.

Myrna and Debi had a falling out after the first issue, and I honestly don't know to this day what it was all about. I could see that Myrna was not into working 24/7 on On OUr Backs like the rest of us, which in hindsight, might have been wise of her! But she dropped out, in any case, and I became editor.

I remember writing my first sex column “Toys For Us”-- that was fun. Those columns eventually became the basis for “Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World.”

In my first paragraph, I tried to convince dykes to get over their sex toy phobias, especially about penetration. I said, "penetration is only as heterosexual as kissing is". I teased everyone about how they could revolutionize their sex life with a little humor and playfulness. My sentiments were quite spontaneous, but I realize now it was a novel approach. People had been SO GRIM about vibrators and sex toys-- they were called "marital aids," at the time, as if they were some kind of awful crutch. Only hookers and sex workers called them “toys!”

Everyone thought sad, dirty old men were the customer base for such “aids”. I had lesbians come into my sex toy shop and actually start CRYING about how they worried that they were going to be kicked out of the gay universe because they wanted to get fucked. No one would believe it now.

The early OOB writers came from a few places, including a lot of classified ads we placed around lesbian journals that would take us. We inherited the Samois mailing list, which was huge at the time. Even though Samois was a lesbian S/M group, it ended up attracting every kind of women who was into sex on any level, because there was nowhere else to go! Plus, it was stuffed with intellectuals and artists. The east coast counterpart was in New York, the Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM).

The gay men who edited Drummer were our mentors in many ways. John Rowberry, John Preston, Jack Fritscher. They had patience and wisdom for everything from printer nightmares to diva models who suddenly acted like they were going to run for Miss America.

The magazine started out with three pieces of fiction, one major feature, a few columns of advice and reviews, and three pictorials. Just like Playboy! We even had a "Bulldagger of the Month" in our first issue.

We were so controversial in the beginning, it completely defined us. There were about three women's bookstores in the whole country who would sell us. Instead, we were distributed by gay men’s bookshops, anarchist/commie bookstores, the underground comix people, and a few old porn purveyors who thought we were a kick in the pants. Prominent women's bookstores either banned us, or carried one copy with a big sign on it about how treacherous and gynocidal we were. Just try and ask them for a copy!

It was bittersweet when I watched all those same bookstores go out of business as the years went by. Part of their misfortune was tied to the overall demise of independent bookstores --- but to some degree they had alienated their natural audience by being such elitists and censors. They never relented. I loved the stubbornness of lesbian separatism, I even miss it now, but the anti-sex germ within it was nothing but pure destruction.

We thought our scene was awfully smart. I remember composing an ad for UTNE Reader, which read: "The most intelligent sex magazine in the world just happens to be lesbian." That was truly our point of view. We were witty and incisive and outrageous. The men's' sex magazines were a torpid bore, straight women hadn't crawled out of their egg yet, and the academics were only talking theory while we were DOING IT. We attracted subscribers from a new hip strata of the counter culture.

Here's another marvel: On Our Backs is the first-- the very first-- national magazine produced with desktop publishing. Debi was the Mac visionary. She though Steve Jobs was a genius and bought us their first personal computer. I remember SOBBING because I thought I wouldn't be able to operate it because I was no good at MATH! That makes me laugh so hard now. We used PageMaker 1.0 to design and typeset the magazine. It had TWO fonts, HElvetica and Palatino. It just cracks me up to think of our design disadvantages. But there was no way to pay the printer bills otherwise. But Apple put us into the nascent geek world, and as everyone discovered, geeks were very sex-positive, in fact, they came up with the word.

Nowadays a gay or sex magazine can make credible ad sales. But in the early 80s, it was like soliciting charitable contributions. No one except the old school porn boys were making any money in the sex biz and they didn't understand our audience or mission. We got most of our content for little or nothing. I worked for free until the very end. We all made our nut in other ways.

But because it was a sex magazine, we had to pay a premium to find a printer who would take us. This is the most clear example of how sexual expression is suppressed--- he who owns the press makes the rules. We had to pay 5-10 times the amount a normal magazine would pay who didn't have "dirty pictures." I am still furious about this discrimination to this very day.

The printers were afraid they'd be closed down by the federal government if they printed porn. In truth, they hadn't been bothered since the early 60s. It's just that the same old farts ran the place, like elephants, and they never got over the McCarthy era. Never. I found that being treated like a pariah as a pornographer in America was very much like how I'd been treated as a socialist in America.

I still remember a few other benchmarks... one was that that we were the first lesbian press of ANY kind to run a real article about AIDS, and its risk to lesbians. The leading lights of the lesbian movement had their heads in the sand when it came to this disease. The standard issue was "lesbians cant' get it." Period. What did they know?

I can't believe how irresponsible they were. AIDS also inspired great dread among dykes because it exposed the fact that the majority of lesbians had had some intercourse with men since the epidemic started. In fact, lesbians at that time were more likely to have sex with "high risk men"-- ie, gay or bi men-- than exclusively straight women were. (This was before AIDS became such a big issue for hets as well).

Anyway, we ran the story that no one wanted to tell. ANother instance of speaking the unspeakable was something a bit more fun. At the end of the 80s, I met a number of dykes who told me they liked to watch gay pron. Funky! I thought it was a hoot, since I'd never tried it. But when I started talking about, I found that many lesbians thought this was another new low in dyke aesthetics. We decided to do an article about dykes digging gay porn, and Honey Lee shot our first pictorial with a real PENIS... two gay guys doing it on the floor while Kitty and BC watched.

Not long after that story, we ran the first lesbian story about female to male transsexuality, and Loren Cameron and Justin Green posed for Honey Lee again. I had no idea what a huge story that would end up being... how many women would be inspired and touched by their words.

On a more practical level, I would easily claim that On Our Backs created the first mainstream acceptance of "women's erotica', the practical steps to finding one's g-spot, and having a free 'n' easy attitude toward dildos and vibrators. We taught the world how to use a strap-on. We made sex fun and smart for women, something that was entirely in a female self-interest. It went way beyond homosexuality, it was really feminist sex liberation.

Lesbians have often asked me if I have any regrets about On Our Backs, and why I ended up leaving my work there after 6+ years.

My regret is that very subject, the leaving. It was brutal. I couldn't' read On Our Backs at all for a few years after I left, it made me so upset. They might have been great issues, btu I was still heartbroken.

In retrospect, I see that when I had my daughter in 1990, even though I planned to go right back to work, I was naive about how my life would change, as many new moms are.

I had a real baby on my hands, and yet OOB had always been my “baby” as well. It was really rough to divide my time without feeling like I was l was an utter failure at both responsibilities.

At the same time, my business co-partner, and best friend, Debi, was going off in her own new directions. At the time I would have told you, “She’s nuts, she’s inside her office screaming about wallpapering her bedroom!”-- but nowadays I wouldn’t presume to judge.

We were all way overdue for a first-rate nervous breakdown. The entire lesbian establishment hated our guts. Mainstream publishers and pornographers ignored us or cheated us. The money pressure was hideous and any moment I expected to be taken away to debtors prison. We had a couple thousand starry-eyed fans who had no idea what kind of trouble we were in, and we didn’t want to spoil their illusion. The reality of our impossibility was devastating, and it didn’t help anymore to hear we were “ahead of our time.”

When I decided I needed to change the balance of my tightrope act in favor of Mommy-ness, Debi hit the roof. She hit the roof, of the roof, of the roof. If only I had let her wrap herself in wallpaper first, maybe I could have avoided the whole thing!

Debi served me with a subpoena for subordinating my corporate responsibility. She had a meeting with me and a lawyer where she said she wanted me to pack my bags in a week (I had in mind a yearlong, find-the-new-editor process) and she wanted a stipulation that I could never write professionally again, at least without paying a hefty portion of my income.

To this day, I have no idea why she went so vengeful I walked out with nothing but my baby in my arms, but that was the reason I had to leave anyway. I don’t regret it, because my motherhood improved about 5000%-- I actually took care of her and saw her little face when I wasn’t one my way to or from work, crabby and exhausted.

But my OOB breakup was gutwrenching. We really did love each other, and I guess that was what made it so bewildering. If everyone had taken a chill pill, I would have loved to work 20 hours a week and find the next new hottie editor. My only solace when I look back on this nightmare is that I hear many other creative teams have had similar fireworks when they broke up. So we were not unique!

Debbie got married to a man, then divorced, and continued to promote her Female Ejaculation video along with other sex education and spiritual projects. She had always wanted the magazine to make money-- real money-- and it must have galled her to ultimately sell the whole operation for a pittance. She realized that videos were where the profits were. I never saw her again after the lawyer nonsense.

Nan got a new girlfriend and moved to Minnesota, working at one of the women's bookstores that used to be a hard ass about On Our Backs, but then changed their ways! She looked me up one year a decade later and when we reunited, we hugged each other for an eternity. She and her lover Christi Cassidy, run Fatale Video, still the original lesbian video company.

Nan and I, along with Debi and Honey, are the only ones who truly know the hair-raising, insane stunts we pulled, day after day, to put out our beloved bit of revolution.

Honey Lee and I broke up after 7 years, and subsequently I was a most fickle and gadabout gal about town for a few years before I settled down with my current lover, Jon. My “baby” is now a grown-up artist herself. and her godmother, Honey Lee, taught her a great deal about photography and film, just as she did with me.

I’m very close to many of the artists I met through OOB-- they’re my family. Aretha has shown photo prints from the early On Our Backs to show her classes. I’m so touched she sees the beauty and authenticity in those things that made me feel so powerful in the very beginning.

Call me and leave me an anniversary message by this Thursday! Seriously, just be spontaneous and go for it: 831 480 5110.

This video is from this past spring, on my memoir book tour. I'm the special guest for the Audible staff lunch break! I think I went beyond the baloney sandwich.

I'm interviewed by Beth Anderson, EVP and my publisher at Audible, who's been there since I first came on board.

I was a little nervous... Audible is staffed by all kinds of people, every stripe of politics, religion and personal interest— as it should be, since they publish every sort of audiobook under the sun!

I'd take that money and make some jobs, millions of really good ones, and I'd hand them out like cookies at the county fair.

I wouldn't have to say one word about it; I'd let my boldness speak for itself. I'd open my wallet and say, "Damn, that road is full of holes. That library's been closed all month. None of these kids or old folks have any vaccinations. What the hell happened to a "free press?" I'd throw money like flying darts at the circus.

The rich, the pin-prick of people who've hoarded nearly all the cash in this country, are not feeling any pain. They are on an economic morphine drip, oblivious. Their servants, their house slaves, are largely the members of our own Congress.

These 21st Century Plutocrats are profiting from a breakdown in civilized society— and their idea of "long-term planning" is their next line of crack. They think can get away with it by hiding in private gated communities, private planes, with private tutors, private doctors, piles of guns, their own little island of the mind. Marie Antoinette was never so deluded as this crop of THIEVES.

If I were president, the pain and sacrifice quota would get turned on its head. I wouldn't be satisfied until public welfare for the public good was number one. A life of equality, democracy, and knowledge-seeking would be paramount. You wouldn't hear me say it more than once. I'd just do it.

I wouldn't pull that b.s. stunt where you pretend environmental protection and job-creation are at cross-purposes. We could employ every man, woman, and child in this country to battle pollution and we'd be lucky to make a dent in the toxic waste dump we've created.

I wouldn't stump the lie that kids just need to buckle down, and parents need to scream more about homework— I'd fund a first rate public education for all.

I'd make phones work again.

Healthcare would be free, for everyone, and prevention in every pot. I'd fund research and investigation into all the pressing issues of our time; I'd turn to the arts in every part of public life. I'd cherish music, theater, filmmaking, publishing— I'd be so busy DOING STUFF you'd never hear me make a peep.

Take note: I am one of those millions whose grandparents starved before they were working class. Their children, my parents, made a dent into middle-class life through a nation's commitment to education and democratic opportunities that were never possible for their elders.

It was supposed to be "Up, Up, and Away, TWA!"

But now we realize it was just a blip, a deviation from the Gilded Age.

The field I work in, publishing and journalism, has been devastated in the last generation. Among my peers, we make 10% (on average) of our former pay scale. We've lost our homes, our careers, our children's educational prospects, our health, our pensions, we've out-frugal'ed the frugal. Moonshine never looked so good.

And what about our old readers, the formerly educated American people? They're rapidly on their way to becoming a crowd of the illiterate, the raptured, and the wildly un-informed. Few people read, and there's little original to be read. Yet everyone knows about Kim Kardashian! That's a free press in a Diamond-Crusted Banana Republic.

A writer or journalist has more in common with a displaced Detroit autoworker than they do with any illusion of white-collar impermeability. What white collar? There's no job— sitting, standing, running, wearing ties or pasties or hardhats— that hasn't been wiped off or whittled from the face of America.

I live in a California coastal town, Santa Cruz, where everything used to be made right here: our food supply, our toilet seats, our chewing gum. Now, virtually nothing legal is made here and the one last gem, the public university, is in ruins. This is a "pretty" town, where because there's still clean air poor people compete like dogs to wait on the rich for peanuts. If you're struggling in our town and you want a major entrepreneurial break, meth dealing is your viable opportunity.

If I had a speech to make, it'd be four words: This Will Not Stand. If the rich don't want a middle class, fine, they'll get a mob. They won't know who to trust— and why should they? Their culture of robbery, corruption, and elitism has no decency, no floor, no noblesse oblige. It's only trap doors, all the way down.

But we read these verses to our little beans again and again, and you think to yourself, “One day I shall miss this.”

I don’t remember when my mom stopped reading to me at bedtime. With my own daughter, I think it was around second grade, when she could certainly read to herself, but still loved being read to. She liked my narration so much in “Eloise” that I once recorded it on a tape cassette so she could hear it while I was on book tour. And Charge It, Please!

I think I lasted until Junior High before I started requiring unending variety in my reading habits. Until then, I was happy to read “Harriet the Spy” or “To Kill a Mockingbird” or Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman” one. more. time. The familiarity of a great novel is one of the most sensual pleasures I know. You never stop gleaning from it; it cradles you in your blanket.

This summer, my 53rd, I discovered repetitive novel reading again. Two things happened: I went to see the Coen Brother’s revival of “True Grit,” loved the dialog, and resolved to read the novel. I also went on a book tour for five months where insomnia in a new hotel or guest bedroom was my constant threat.

What a discovery. I could not get enough of Mattie Ross’s opening lines—

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”

—as told by author Charles Portis. When I discovered Donna Tartt was reading "True Grit" on an audio edition, I completely lost interest in everything else and became as maniacal as any three year old who will only listen to “The Cat in the Hat.”

I would say I have read or listened to “True Grit,” and another Portis title, “The Dog of the South,” about twenty times each this summer and I am not yet REMOTELY sick of them. I will never tire. Furthermore, their stickiness has raised the bar on my standards— I don’t want to read another new book unless it warrants repeated incantations; I want to be that insatiable child again, every time I lay down with a new tall tale.

How did reading get to be such a faster-pussycat-hurry-up activity? We listen to favorite songs over and over without apology or distraction. They make us feel good, no explanation necessary. The same is true of movies— no one in the family complains when you want to watch "The Big Lebowski" or "Lost in Translation" or Season 1 of "Law and Order" over and over again. It’s understood.

But with books, there’s this myth that it takes a "long time" to get through one, and that you have to gather speed and keep moving, keep turning the pages, ever-new, ever-seeking, in order to read all the classics, all the must’s, all the new year specials, all the awards. If you pause to linger, you will MISS OUT, lose your rank, become some doddering old fool who hasn’t moved on since Margaret Spoke to God.

But it really isn’t like that, is it? I can read most novels in a bedtime or two; if they’re entertaining, you don’t want to put them down. Why do I then cast them aside, if they were memorable? Ever-lasting enchantment shouldn't be so quickly tossed. Why not linger in your bubble bath if the water’s still warm and no one’s pounding on the door?

This realization has made me think differently about my own writing. I wonder if anyone has read one of my books more than once— that would be the greatest praise. My YA author friend Jill Wolfson heard out my theories, and she said, “You should write books for kids. There is nothing like getting a fan letter that starts out with, ‘I have now finished your book for the tenth time…’”

I looked at her with slobbering envy— yes, yes, that’s what I want! I want my poetry in people’s dreams, I want to stick around like a spell! I want fragments of my novels blurted out by fifth-graders and people in comas.

Justly, the key to writing page-worn novels is reading more of them, I’m certain of it. Typing them out is my new sugar snack. I dare you: sit down at a keyboard and type the entire first chapter of something you adore. I’ve been returning to my youthful pleasures with a vengeance. Right now I’m listening to Dashiell Hammett’s "Red Harvest," which I first read in high school and within whose pages I also apparently cleaned a lid of pot— I keep finding all these little seeds. I’m tilling it for second time in four days, and it’s a beauty.

September 05, 2011

"How many erotic minds did Susie Bright open? Her influence on the happiest cultural sea change of the past quarter-century— the broadening American attitude toward sex, sexuality, and homosexuality— was profound, if indirect.

After editing the pioneering lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs in the 1980s, she published a collection of carnal advice columns in 1990, Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World, which established her as an uncommon voice of reason on a subject— sex— that causes so many thoughtful people to lose their heads.

Bright rejected shame and timidity posing as egalitarian enlightenment. She wrote candidly about fisting, butch-femme role-playing, and kink. She said she aspired to be the Pauline Kael of porn, and you can hear in her writing some of that other Californian's provocative, hip-motherly tone. She became bohemia's great sex educator instead: radical and feminist in the tradition of Ellen Willis, defending dirty fantasy for its own sake, but in blunt, cheerful prose.

Four more collections of essays followed in the '90s alone, joining two erotic anthology series she launched and edited. If her attitude is tough to distinguish now from the prevailing sensibility on campus, that's a measure of how much the margins define thought in America.

Not that Bright takes credit for any of that in Big Sex Little Death, her new memoir, which ends in the '90s with her moving to Santa Cruz (with her male partner and daughter) to teach a university course on pornography.

The book is an intimate account of the history she helped make, but it's like an epic shot entirely in close-up, skimping on context, and without any pretension that her story matters to anyone but her. The mind changing she takes pride in is all individual, like her one-on-one interactions with customers walking into Good Vibrations, the San Francisco vibrator store where she worked in the '80s. "One little chat," she writes, "and they wouldn't think they needed to rely on someone else for their orgasm."

Bright had been a revolutionary before she was a sexual revolutionary. Leaving an abusive mother in Canada who once threatened her with murder-suicide ("I'm driving us into the river"), she moved to live with her father in Los Angeles in the early '70s and attended University High School, where she became a "score girl" for the swim team and joined the socialist newspaper The Red Tide.

She started having sex with men and women— one of each, together, her first time. Before a swim banquet at the Playboy club, she had never been on a date: "I just went to meetings and demos and ended up in bed with my friends."

In this radical milieu, where "everyone was down with women's liberation and nonmonogamy," Bright saw utopia. "No one would bother to be jealous. Who would have the time? Sex would be friendly and kind and fun. You'd get to see what everyone was like in bed."

Bright found kindness, at first, in the International Socialists, a small but national Trotskyist organization that emphasized forming industrial unions where there were none and reforming existing ones, such as the then-notorious Teamsters. Bright's labor organizing brought her to African American communities in Detroit and Louisville. But she doesn't shape her story enough to say exactly how she got "an FBI file three inches thick" there. Her most vivid descriptions are emotional. Expelled in the mid-'70s, along with half of the group's membership, she writes, "I was accused of joining or leading a cult of personality. Which one? I didn't know what my personality was anymore."

Easing other people's minds about sex became Bright's mission. She remembered a fellow student in one of her women's studies classes who raised her hand and confessed to "rape fantasies" only to be told by classmates that she'd been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Bright kept quiet about her own taboo daydreams, and her sense that the term her fellow students used was something of a misnomer by definition: "In fantasy, I got only as scared as I wanted to be. I was only as subservient or sadistic as I cared to conjure. It started and ended with my trigger finger. Contrary to my real life, fantasies were...mine."

Yet this battle with the literal-minded strain of anti-sexism took on the anguish of a sectarian split in feminism, particularly as On Our Backs— its very title a tweak of the anti-porn women's publication off our backs— forced the issue. Bright writes that some women's bookstores, such as A Room of One's Own in Madison, Wisconsin, "issued press releases in which they accused us of being virulent racists and anti-Semitists, of practicing female genocide, of endorsing white slavery, of being pimps masquerading as women." Death threats and protests came, eventually followed by curiosity over what all the fuss had been about.

In the end, as Bright writes, "Madison Avenue took the sizzle of the lesbian feminist sex wars and put it in their own steak. How do you get from Patti Smith to Girls Gone Wild?" (Short version: Nobody and the Internet won.)

Yet there was more in those dirty pictures. Bright writes that "male magazines' centerfolds of female models were about: Am I pretty? Am I darling?" By contrast, "the great relief of dyke porn was that all that went out the window. We had an objective on our minds; we didn't need to be reassured that we were 'hot.' We had a sexual story to tell. We asked each participant, 'What's yours?'"

Bright must sense that this epiphany is the heart of her story, the point of her musical, but she has so many other passions and loves to honor: her parents, who get many, many chapters before our main character enters the picture, plus numerous lovers, friends, and benefactors to whom she owes a debt of description. This cascade of personal history becomes sprawling -- there still seems to be something of the young Susie pleasing everyone here. But her story is far from over, and it's too good to pass up for being less than perfect."

—Peter Scholtes

--------------------

I found this Rain Taxi review of my memoir entirely by accident. It blew me away... in part, of course, because it was so admiring, but also because I saw my biography differently after I read Peter Scholtes's appraisal.

His criticisms are fair and revealing. I really don't know how to write about my "influence" without feeling like a pretentious boor. I'm sure a more experienced memoirist would've known how to handle it. I know my name means nothing to most people and a great deal to a certain few. It's a memoir conundrum!

Many people have asked me about that one line from my book, that I had "an FBI file that was three inches thick."

How did I get it? What does it take to make government spies sit up and take notice?

In my estimation, very little. My book does describe all the things I did that made J. Edgar Hoover give a shit— but it's not all that interesting to dwell on. My life isn't the story the FBI paints.

I was indeed a teenage socialist— and calling yourself one is a strike against you by the FBI's lights. I was a labor organizer, a civil rights activist— black people and trade unions make the FBI break into hives.

If you are on ONE picket line, there's some snitch taking notes and your name will come into play. I went to hundreds of meetings, demonstrations, "happenings," protests... I was a leader, for that matter. I wrote the leaflets and pamphlets and printed them and handed them out at dawn. For every "Huey Newton" or "Abbie Hoffman," there were thousands of unnamed activists (especially unnamed women!) who toiled without any fame or headlines.

One thing that offended me when I saw my file, was the the FBI is like Queen Victoria... they don't seem to believe that lesbians exist, let alone feminists. There is not one note about any of my queer or women's liberation activities.

Instead, the FBI was obsessed with the Teamsters, the Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, everyone associated with the 1968 riots in Chicago and the ensuing trial... if you ever shared so much as a napkin with any of those characters, you have an FBI file. Girls?— Not so much.

My "three inches" is both a collection of ridiculous trivia, workaday activism, Cold War hysteria, racist bullshit, and a certain indication that I was a devoted anti-capitalist. They got that part right.

I'm glad I discovered Rain Taxi; it's a really good book review journal and I gobbled the whole summer issue up. I hope you'll take a look at them yourself.

July 25, 2011

I'm putting together a collection of my earliest essays, reporting, and reviews of erotic cinema, much of which was first published in Penthouse Forum in the early 80s, as well as more obscure publications.

There are no digital files, alas.

The photocopies I possess have proven to be inadequate for OCR software— they need to be typed all over again, this time in Microsoft Word or Pages.

I'm a mediocre typist—and I have my hands full with editing the new book.

I need an extra set of hands, preferably nimble and accurate.

There's 25 pieces that need to by typed; each is ~700 words. I would love to have them all done in about a week. I can send you PDF files of the original works.

If you are a quick, accurate typist, and the idea of reading my early takes on old-school porn appeals to you— would you email me with your details and a bid? I'd much appreciate it. I'm already composing my gushing thanks to you in the acknowledgements.

Susie

UPDATE, 1pm:

—Just checked my IN box and there's about a hundred blazing typists offering their services... WOW. I'm going to review them all now, but thank you so much for replying; I'll be in touch today. I'm going to turn off the faucet now!

Photo: Honey Lee Cottrell. The wheat-pasted street art on the newspaper box was signed by "arms akimbo." Above the headline, "JUST SEX" is a photo of Honey Lee and I in a bathtub, which was taken by Mariette Pathy Allen. How it ended up on this random Market Street news stand, I have no idea, but it was a fun surprise for all of us..

July 05, 2011

Hard to believe, but I've dismounted from my Big Sex Little Death book tour. I am now having a quiet, discreet little nervous breakdown but it's really not that bad— I still have a smile on my face.

It all began in Detroit on March 16th and culiminated with my Grand Marshall cape flying, at the SF Pride Parade on June 26th.

Here's the reviews my memoir has garnered, if you'd like some critical snap!

Like any author who undertakes a massive book tour, I relied on the kindess and euphoria of strangers who hosted, promoted, fed, bathed, and delighted me all over the country. And, to all of you who subscribe to my blog— without you, this financially would have been impossible. Thank you so much.

I am so grateful to all of you— please consider yourself welcome at my house anytime. The chili is ON.

Aside from the sheer "animal husbandry" of keeping a touring author alive, the conversations, books, and political insights I shared with all of you are a valuable book in themselves.

*Thank you, ALL OF YOU, so much.

So What's Next?

I'm writing an illustrated guide to the erotic, political, pharmaceutical, and culinary highlights of my tour— details to come. I hope to publish that by August.

Upcoming Tour Dates

I'm doing a couple college lecture and book club dates in October this year— I have a two dates left on the calendar if you're interested. I'll post the plans by Labor Day.

There's so many places I didn't get to; like Canada, for instance.

Or Miami, Austin, New Orleans, Portland-Maine, Denver-Boulder, San Diego, Kansas City— I've received all your letters and I am pining as much as you!

My plan is: Let's plan a spring tour, next April-May. This is the time to start scheming, because it takes money, brilliant scheduleing, and willpower to pull it all off.

Do I have an audio version? Of course! I even have a new page on Audible with all thirty+ my books listed.

Sex-Positive Parenting

What about my sex-postive parenting workshops? Well, for those of you who were there, I think we all left in a little bit of a daze— it was unforgettable. You could have heard a pin drop the hours we spent together. I definitely want to write about this: how raising kids changes your sex life and foretells/impacts how their sex lives will develop.

If you were there, I need your help! If you attended one of my workshops, can you remember what you said in our discussion? Send it to me!

Do you remember some of the other stories you heard? Email me what stuck in your head!

I tried in vain to remember everyone's history, but as we weren't recording or taking notes (which I'm glad of) my recollections are incomplete.

I began to daydream my own version of a Portis novel, an homage to his great narrators.

In my pass, the first-person is going to be a cranky bulldagger of the first water— on a great improbable journey, of course.

If you know Portis' work, I can imagine you're cackling with glee at the prospect; if you don't know what I'm talking about, just pick up a copy of anything he's written and hang on to your hat.

I realize I've been living among Portis-heads all my life and didn't know it. I once cared for a quixotic cat named "Norwood" without knowing his credentials. Hunter Thompson used to quote entire Portis passages to me, laughing up his nose, and I didn't realize he wasn't quoting himself! Okay, the jig is up, you sneaks; I'm in all the way now.